As context, I've attended SFIFF since 1990, focusing at first with limited time off work on the revivals, which in the Peter Scarlet era sometimes included real rarities. I then started following auteurs such as Arturo Ripstein whose work surfaced year by year, and catching up with the buzz--movies that might be opening soon but that I had been reading about almost a year before from Cannes and elsewhere. (It still seems unreasonable that a major arts city like ours should have to wait over a year to participate in much of this conversation.)
Recently I've moved toward titles that the fest lists as not having a distribution deal, as I've learned these are the ones worth standing in line for. I came to better appreciate the commercial releases in a less stressful setting later. So of the 18 reviewed below, only one, which I saw the day after the closing, was listed at the time for distribution.
I was familiar with all eight of the revivals and certainly wasn't going to revisit the three (Unforgiven, Tommy, House by the River) that were inexplicably being presented on video. In the case of the last, if it's true that honoree Pierre Rissient chose to have Lang's work projected that way, then I can only use the word Richard Roud did to describe an early book by Rissient on Losey: Grotesque.
I'll go with the somewhat dumbed down scale, 1 (Poor) to 4 (Excellent), from the fest ballots (it used to be 1 to 5), and will note which programs were on actual film. Ideally, one would know before buying tickets what format each originated on and what format the fest was showing each in, but getting that info from the fest and other sources is like pulling teeth, so occasionally I had to take a chance, only to find out later that I wasn't always getting the real thing (Dreileben - Don't Follow Me Around and By the Fire appear to have been 16mms that we only got to see on digital).
4 ½: The closest that what I caught of the fest got to offering something by a mature master, working at the top of his form, was Guediguian's The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Film), a welcome return by one of France's few leftist, committed directors, with his ensemble troupe, to the Marseilles setting of his earlier work. A largely successful attempt to update a touching narrative poem by Hugo into the modern setting of labor unions and layoffs, The Snows provoked a discussion among some cinephiles as to how far the co-writer (fortunately now in Berkeley and there for Q & A) and helmer should go in using contrivance, several of the more narrow-minded not accepting anything that didn't meet their standards of ordinary believability.
4: Last Winter (Film). John Shank, an American, couldn't get funding for his project about the struggle of a contemporary farmer, but was able once he relocated to Europe to take advantage of the more generous financing there. The Belgian co-production speaks to the larger subject but seems rooted in the mid-Pyrenees where much of it was shot, beautifully, with a use of light and dark that surpassed anything else for me in the fest, and a moodiness that at times evoked Bresson. Some did not share my view and preferred what looked to be the easier-to-take, crowd-pleasing rural entries, a genre the fest's programmers apparently favor.
4: Old Dog: A China/Tibet co-production that is a neo-realist-like triumph of imaginative staging over a poverty of resources. The video looked crummy but those last two long takes were among the most memorable scenes in the fest, making Pema Tseden a director to reckon with.
4: Rebellion. I haven't followed Matthieu Kassovitz's directorial career since La Haine, but he has apparently learned something from his work as an actor with Spielberg (Munich) in terms of putting together a reality-based political thriller, here about French arrogance in dealing with Pacific rebels in 1988. The staging of the jungle action, in which he stars as well, also evoked Fuller (Merrill's Marauders). Some of us who had never heard of this incident may not think of Mitterand and Chirac in the same way again.
3: By the Fire. The Chilean director made good use of scenes in which the camera kept its distance from the characters, putting the lie to the argument made elsewhere by Pierre Rissient that the great auteurs keep their camera close. Mr. Almendras didn't employ even one close-up though the story was about the intimacy of a couple.
3: A Cube of Sugar (Film). A (upper-?) middle-class Iranian family prepares for a wedding, with all the color and sociological observation that affords. After a pokey beginning, something sad happens that elevates the film to another level. At its best Mirkarimi's work is comparable to the humane warmth of Satyajit Ray.
3: The Double Steps. This is what fest fanatic Sue Jean Halvorsen dubs a Wild Card: something you weren't expecting that stays with you. The blurbs described it as a semi-documentary on an obscure French painter, but it was actually a rollicking adventure comedy about a band of African misfits making their way through Mali desert scenery. The auteur of this Spanish/Swiss production is Isaki Lacuesta, writer of an acclaimed title from a previous fest, Garbo The Spy, which I've still to catch up with.
3: Dreileben. I'll treat this three-part series for German TV as one item, especially since I saw it all in one day. The title, besides referring to the way the three directors tell different lives, refers to a small town in the Thuringia Forest area of the former East Germany, which is where a criminal imprisoned under that regime lurks in the woods. The format allowed the Berlin School auteurs (Petzold, Graf, and Hochhauesler) to experiment with differing styles of storytelling and to bring up various issues such as the unification of the two Germanies, the treatment of immigrants, the ambivalence of justice, and the mysteriousness of the past. Fellow buffs disagreed as to which episodes worked best, but this was definitely one of the must-see items in the schedule.
3: Guilty (Film). Philippe Torreton (who had a small role in Rebellion) gives a strong performance as an accused bailiff in this docu-drama-style revisiting of a recent French legal scandal that reminded some of the Dreyfus Affair. The audience was gripped by Garenq's skillful direction.
3: Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema. This is technically a 2007 film, but only now is getting its Bay Area premiere. Veteran former Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy, who made this, was fortunately here for an interesting talk with the subject, an eccentric French film aficionado who with his MacMahonite group in Paris and his championing of pet directors at Cannes has helped shape modern taste. This kind of program is what I call catnip for film buffs, and there was much to mull over afterwards.
3: Smugglers' Songs. Even on video, one could appreciate the gifted Irina Lubtchansky's photography in this informative take on Louis Mandrin, a pre-French-Revolution outlaw, though the work as a whole was perhaps not as good as Ameur-Zaimeche's earlier Adhen, shown at French Cinema Now.
3: Twixt. A treat to see Coppola's latest with a big Castro audience including some of the local technicians and a few actors who worked on it. As in his last two independent efforts, the director is having fun playing with form: here a few 3-D sequences where one has to take glasses on and off, there some desaturated hues with little bursts of green, yellow, or red highlighted as if in a hand-painted silent. The story with its mixture of Poe, the frustrated writer played by Val Kilmer, and small-town skullduggery out of Twin Peaks was less successful but apparently Coppola is still tweaking the edit and sound before, hopefully, a commercial release. This was one of the fest's items that was just plain fun.
2: Sleeping Sickness (Film): German doctor can't seem to leave Africa in this oblique echo of Conrad. Director Koehler is known for his elliptical, enigmatic approach but this one left some of us just plain unsatisfied.
1: The Day He Arrives (Film). This latest by Hong Sang Soo, digitally shot, was shown on video at the fest but I caught it on its release the next day, on film. It is of interest as part of Hong's oeuvre but his schtick of drinking scenes with similar-looking characters in slight variations has worn out its welcome. One fan compared it to The Mother And The Whore, but in that much longer work at least the characters (maybe because they were French) had interesting things to say. And the decision to use a dialed-down, greyish/green color palette resulted in drab visuals with none of the depth of composition from Hong's rich earlier films.
1: The Fourth Dimension. This was one of the fest's few world premieres, so the three co-directors, as well as star Val Kilmer, were here for what was unfortunately a misconceived program for an episode film. Harmony Korine can be blamed for some of the ideas behind this but his contribution at least was typically offbeat and interesting to look at. Fedorchenko, helmer of last year's strong Silent Souls, disappointed with a time-travelling effort, and newcomer Kwiecinski did not get off to an auspicious start with his segment.
1: Target. I'd been warned by a friend in New York, where people walked out, to skip this but because it figured on several prominent critics' top-ten lists and might not come around again, I suffered through. We knew we were in trouble when the visiting Russian director Zeldovich, offered the choice between 35mm and a DCP, eagerly embraced the latter. The turgid sci-fi satire, vaguely inspired by Anna Karenina, combined the worst of Ken Russell and Andrei Tarkovsky, with only three sequences spoofing a TV cooking show, with a motor-mouthed emcee, showing any vitality. A sex-in-the-sawdust scene was probably the fest's low point for me. What's more, this self-indulgence went on for two and a half hours.
There are programs besides the eventual commercial releases I look forward to seeing some other time, but my scheduling steered me toward afternoon and early evening shows, with the priority on those I had already read or heard something about. Later I filled in with recommends from word of mouth but if there was a choice (one can see from the above that not many presentations were on celluloid) I gravitated toward the film on film, as this year I have really gotten tired of all the videos.
I think all said I made pretty good choices, with few stinkers and most of them worth the effort.
I am now reading about this year at Cannes, in preparation for the 2013 SFIFF!